Not much went right when the chief executives of the world's fourth and fifth largest contract manufacturers started discussing a potential marriage three months ago. The hotel conference room where they met near the Phoenix, Ariz., airport was cramped and seriously lacking in air conditioning. Even the bottled water was too warm to drink as Randy Furr, president and COO of Sanmina, made the pitch for his younger firm, then worth $7.7 billion, to buy SCI, then worth $4 billion, and considered a pioneer in the fast-growing business of manufacturing tech hardware for name-brand companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia. After...